Last week Benchmarks hosted their Member-Only Annual Dinner and Meeting at the beautiful Grandover Resort in Greensboro, NC.
Benchmarks’ President and Chief Executive Officer, Karen McLeod, presented awards to Representative Josh Dobson, Senator Ralph Hise, and Stephanie Gilliam, DHHS Chief of the Mental Health Licensure and Certification Section at the Division of Health Services Regulation for their tireless work for the children and families of North Carolina.
Susan Perry, Chief Deputy Secretary, presented up to date information on Medicaid Transformation and shared the vision for North Carolina. She also shared with the audience her personal courageous story of navigating the system.
Kody Kinsley, Deputy Secretary for Behavioral Health & Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities at DHHS, leads state-wide public policy and operations that promote whole-person health by developing prevention methods, interventions, and systems of care for individuals living with mental illness, intellectual or developmental disabilities, traumatic brain injuries, and substance use disorders. Kody spoke about NCCARE360, a North Carolina telephonic, online and interfaced IT resource platform that will provide a robust statewide resource repository of community-based programs and services as well as a referral platform that allows health care providers, insurers and human service providers to connect people to resources in their communities.
District Attorney Ben David is currently serving his fourth term in New Hanover and Pender Counties. Ben spoke about The Five Arms of the Starfish, which represent outreach efforts and a way to give people a sense of belonging in the community. These five arms are: Government, Schools, Business, Non-Profits, and Faith organizations.
Holding it all together at the center of the starfish is health. This includes physical health and mental health, but also healthy relationships and a healthy lifestyle. Ben rarely sees healthy people in the criminal justice system. Many defendants are weighed down by drug dependencies, behavioral disorders, and severely dysfunctional relationships. The same root causes that contribute to poor health and overrun the hospital also wash up on the courthouse steps.
Ben believes that peace and safety is the entire community’s concern and that police and prosecutors cannot just be reactive, they must be proactive. Ben shared that he “Looks toward a future where it would be legal malpractice not to look at social determinants of health.”
And finally, the audience heard the story of Shenandoah Chefalo, who fiercely advocates for children in foster care everywhere she goes. Shenandoah shared her journey through a childhood with neglectful parents who struggled with addictions to drugs and alcohol, enduring 50 moves, many in the middle of the night with just minutes to pack, multiple changes in schools, hunger, cruelty and loneliness. Finally, at the age of 13, after being abandoned by her mother for months at her grandmother’s retirement community, she asked to be put in foster care. Although, her experience in foster care was not the happy ending she thought it would be. Her foster parents were more interested in the income received, and she found herself once again neglected emotionally. But her story did not stop there. As she was getting ready to graduate high school, a teacher believed in her and sponsored her college application fee. One caring adult changed her life forever. Shenandoah believes that “If you can be a positive stable adult, you have done your work!”
Shenandoah overcame her many adversities and is now seeking to encourage and challenge those in power on state and federal levels, as well as those providing care, to provide the best care possible to children in foster care.
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